Icebreakers For Virtual Meetings: 5 Great Ones & 3 Mistakes To Avoid

Basically, each color M&M is assigned a question or a characteristic. A red candy, for example, could be your favorite film, the green one could be your greatest fear. Encourage collaboration – When people feel relaxed, they will be more able to interact comfortably with each other and the facilitator. Finally, once everyone has shared their individual roses and thorns, ask each team member to share a ‘bud’ – something they’re looking forward to in the not-too-distant future. Plus, by adding a little bit of friendly competition, this will encourage collaboration and motivate your teams to better communicate with one another. Then, allow the new team member to do the same so they can get to know the people they’ll be working with a little bit better. We’ve got a few ideas here which you might find useful.

If your team members enjoy reading, this idea will surely be a winner. To play this game, you need to pick various topics, assign a host, and have your team members grab a drink to participate. You can either come up with the questions yourself or use an online pub quiz question generator. Send the questions to the team before the meeting some examples of questions could be who is your favourite superhero? Then get the team one after the other to read out their answers. By sharing common interest and ideas, team members will feel closer together.

What Is an Icebreaker?

You can use it whether people know each other well, a bit or not at all. School education is not easy to handle in the online mode. There is a big gap, and students do miss the kind of interaction that takes place in a real classroom environment within a conducive space and customised furniture. The teachers are eager to get back to the normal classroom teaching model. Because of the creative and cooperative nature of this game, it is a good activity to use either as an icebreaker or as a team-building activity.

• Fika is a Swedish word that means a coffee or cake break.
• They are also great for team bonding, especially before starting an important project where collaboration between team members is especially vital.
• If having one every day is a good idea, do you think there should be some sort of link between them?

Thanks to COVID I think we’ve all overdosed on virtual meetings to some extent, especially during the early days of the pandemic. For most of us having NO face-to-face meetings during lock down was a new phenomenon. In this method, the participants have one icebreakers for virtual meetings minute to bring the most unusual device from their home in front of the camera. If necessary, you can extend the exercise by asking the participants to present their device to another person in breakout sessions without showing the device beforehand.

Tools for managing virtual team building activities

When the time is up, switch up the pairs by reallocating people to different partners in breakout rooms. Example of a quiz on a simple Excel spreadsheet, emailed at the start of the session. Your creative ideas help us to inspire the students. I will use one of them with students of medicine school in my online class tomorrow. I will be introducing some of these great icebreakers right this week in my training. In the First activity, any specific reason why the participant with the most incorrect wins is the winner. I’ve already taken up new ideas from here for my next class.